'She turned up to work with bits of debris still in her hair': the women war reporters you've never heard of

In her new book, Australian Women War Reporters, Jeannine Baker tells the stories of the women who fought for the right to report from war zones

Four days after D-Day, Australian war correspondent Anne Matheson reached Normandy to cover the aftermath of the Allied invasion for the Australian Women’s Weekly. She staked her claim as a pioneering women reporter by proclaiming, “I am in France, I landed on the beachhead this morning ... the first Australian woman to come here since Dunkirk four years ago.”

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There were probably more than 100 accredited Allied women war correspondents in the European theatre, although exact figures are not available. Matheson was one of three tenacious, resourceful and intrepid Australian women – the others were Elizabeth Riddell and Margaret Gilruth – who became war reporters in Europe, although if it had been up to the British government they would never have been permitted to leave the home front.
Although British women journalists insisted repeatedly that they could cope with “the hazards of the profession” just as well as their male colleagues, the British War Office remained violently opposed to accrediting women as war correspondents.
Margaret Gilruth, a reporter for the Melbourne Herald group of newspapers, arrived in Rheims, France in May 1940, just before the Nazis invaded the Low Countries. Her aim was to “have a peaceful survey of the war zone”, but the following day, she wrote, she became “a real war correspondent and the only British newspaper woman watching activities at first hand”. Claiming to be “the only woman journalist with the Royal Air Force in France”, Gilruth covered the activities of the Royal Air Force (RAF) Advanced Air Striking Force and the exploits of Australasian ace pilots Leslie Clisby and Edgar ‘Cobber’ Kain in bombing raids in Belgium.
Gilruth’s exceptional aviation experience and knowledge challenged the assumption, prevalent at this time, that women had little technical competence or interest in military machinery. She had obtained a pilot’s licence in Melbourne in the early 1930s, and while working for the London Daily Express became the first Australian woman to make a parachute jump. This activity was not for the faint-hearted. At an altitude of 2000 feet Gilruth first crawled along the aeroplane’s wing, then sat on “an insecure, uncomfortable perch, feet dangling into space and hands tightly clutching the struts”, until she was given the signal to fall backwards.

Matheson turned up at the ACP office the next morning with dust, bits of debris and glass still in her hair and clothes

During the Battle of Britain, which lasted from June 1940 to June 1941, German bombers attacked large British ports and industrial centres such as Liverpool, Sheffield, Manchester, Plymouth, Birmingham and Bristol. While all Londoners were in danger from aerial bombardments, journalists in particular faced great personal risks because they were often expected to be out in the open during the most hazardous periods.
Several news organisation buildings, including those of the Times and the Evening Standard, and the BBC’s Broadcasting House, were directly hit by German bombs in September and October of 1940. The homes of many journalists were damaged or destroyed. Anne Matheson and her flatmate were the only survivors when their Kensington apartment block suffered a direct hit in October 1940. Matheson turned up at the ACP office the next morning as usual, “with dust, bits of debris and glass still in her hair and clothes”, and then sat down and wrote about her experiences.
The Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (Shaef) was established in London in January 1944, with General Dwight Eisenhower as supreme commander of all Allied forces in Europe. In May 1944, a compromise was reached between Shaef and the British War Office that allowed for the accreditation of British women war correspondents.

Women journalists, of any nationality, were barred from accompanying the Allied invasion troops carrying out the D-Day landings at Normandy on 6 June 1944. Within days of the D-Day landings, Eisenhower lifted the ban on women reporters visiting Normandy, with the stipulation that the women reporters would be expected to cover stories associated with the “woman’s angle” on war: the movement of the first group of Women’s Army Corps (WACs) to France, and the activities of hospitals on the Far Shore. But whether American, British or Commonwealth, women correspondents were initially denied accommodation, transport and dispatch transmission facilities in France, and trips to Normandy were necessarily brief. Matheson slept overnight in a foxhole; others found a bed on the Liberty ships or tank landing ships (LSTs).
In late August 1944, after the liberation of Paris, nearly 30 female correspondents applied to visit the city. Eisenhower’s concern that there should be a balance of British and American women led to a three-week visit to France for six London-based journalists, including Elizabeth Riddell. It seemed to Riddell that “there were women everywhere”, but they were still in the minority, and unlike the male reporters they were largely confined as a group to the communications zone rather than allowed to go out and find individual stories. Shaef stipulated that women reporters must be located in this demarcated domestic area on the periphery of the combat zone alongside the women’s support services such as the Red Cross.
Rarely content with what Riddell disparagingly referred to as the “nice little trips” they were offered, women made use of their military contacts or collaborated with male journalists to get away from the press camp. Mostly “it was boring beyond belief”, and so Riddell jumped at the chance to take off for three days with fellow Australian war correspondent Sam White, raising the ire of the group’s “nanny”, Lord Astor. The pair travelled to Metz in France, which was still under fire by the Germans. Her overwhelming feelings were not fear, but curiosity and detachment.
Riddell also recalled coming across an empty press camp in Nancy, in France, just after the Germans had driven the Allies back: “We headed back to Paris in a jeep, in uniform. We were in great danger, terrified out of our wits, thinking, ‘If the Germans catch us they won’t stop to ask us who we are, they’ll kill us.’”

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When Matheson got the opportunity to interview the former head of the Luftwaffe, Herman Goering, following his capture in May 1945, she believed that her response to him was more “emotional” that that of the male correspondents, who “were interested in the strategy of the war.” Matheson’s brilliant report is a fascinating portrait of a repellent, feminine man, stripped of power:

When he crossed his legs I could see Hermann was wearing grey silk socks nearly as long as a woman’s stockings. They wrinkled around his fat ankles, from which the flesh hung over his red leather shoes. He carried grey gloves. But for all his dressiness, the left breast, where the medals should have been hanging shining in the afternoon sunshine, was unadorned. Only row upon row of neatly embroidered eyelet holes where his decorations had once hung marked the spot.

In April and May 1945, Matheson reported from the destroyed cities of Cologne and Nuremberg, and visited one of Hitler’s hideouts at Schloss Ziegenberg, as well as the liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

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Matheson was one of the few western reporters who interviewed a survivor of Buchenwald, Englishman Leon Greenman. Greenman stated the reason for his internment as being “too outspoken against the Nazis”; his Dutch-Jewish family background is not mentioned. However, the story makes perfectly clear the horrific fate of concentration camp prisoners. In Berkinau, said Greenman, he had seen “all the horrors of thousands of prisoners being killed in gas chambers”. But while the reports of most US and British reporters focused on their own personal reactions to the scenes inside the Nazi concentration camps, in this article Matheson’s role as a witness receded, and by allowing Greenman to tell his own story, she conveyed his humanity.